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MAD Magazine

News about MAD Magazine, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Updated April 13, 2009

The days of potrzebie, Arthur the potted plant, the veeblefetzer and other furshlugginer ideas are long past. Much has changed since Pronto and the Lone Stranger rode into the sunset and 'the usual gang of idiots' invented the game of '43-Man Squamish.' But lives there a mind unsullied by the influence of Mad?

The gap-toothed, mentally challenged grin of the magazine's freckled mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, has managed to seep into the unconscious of several generations. Roger Ebert said Mad taught him how to be a movie critic. Andy Warhol said it taught him to love people with big ears.

But who is Alfred E. Neuman and why is he still looking at us like that? Isn't he showing his age a bit, now that movies have become parodies of themselves, advertisements have become Madly self-referential entertainments and 'South Park's' sound effects have replaced 'What -- me worry?'

The answers aren't simple; neither is Alfred. He is a man of many devices. His face actually existed long before Mad existed, goofily appearing on matchbooks, soda advertisements and turn-of-the-century 'dental parlor' souvenirs. In her history of the magazine, 'Completely Mad,' Maria Reidelbach suggests that Alfred is an archetypal American trickster, the outsider who becomes the lord of misrule, the inverter of reason and order, thriving in every era.

But now his weakness is unmistakable. In 1972 Mad's circulation reached a peak of over two million. As of April 2009, the magazine has gone quarterly, and 2008 circulation has been estimated at below 200,000. Mad once defined American satire; now it heckles from the margins as all of culture competes for trickster status. What is left to overturn?

Immediately after World War II, though, the magazine's mission was clear: to mock culture's pretense and test its limits. Mad's founder, William M. Gaines, following in the footsteps of his father (who may have invented the American comic book), was coming under increasing attack for his grotesque horror comics. Psychologists, congressmen and newspapers joined in an alliance; The Hartford Courant referred to the 'filthy stream that flows from the gold-plated sewers in New York.' Gaines responded by stirring the waters further, casting his critics into the roaring current.

Mad burst on the scene in the early 1950s with a series of comic books written by Harvey Kurtzman, considered by many the godfather of underground comics. Cartoonists like Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco have spoken with reverence of Mr. Kurtzman, whose first comic book, in 1952, was called 'Tales to Drive You MAD: Humor in a Jugular Vein.'

'When you look at the Mad comic book under the direction of Harvey Kurtzman, it blows your mind,' Mr. Sacco once said. 'It opened cartoonists up to what the possibilities of the medium were. It showed how zany comics could be. It had a profound influence on every great underground cartoonist, from Robert Crumb to S. Clay Wilson.'

And the influence, these cartoonists said, extended into American society. The legions of young boys (the readership has been overwhelmingly male) who would religiously read the magazine were taught how to thumb their noses at authority.

'Mad was more important than pot and LSD in shaping the generation that protested the Vietnam War,' Mr. Spiegelman, a staff writer and cartoonist for The New Yorker, once said. 'Mad was an urban junk collage that said, 'Pay attention, the media are lying to you -- including this comic book.' '

The first issues of Mad were themselves a challenge to the pieties of traditional comics, ridiculing their sugary innocence, showing, for example, a seedy Mickey Mouse, badly needing a shave. Reading those early issues, one can follow the editors and writers gradually lifting their gaze and finding similarly hypocritical forces all around them in advertising, movies and business. Even the glories of classic verse turn banal: 'In Levittown did Irving Kahn/ A lovely Cape Cod house decree.'

So for the Mad writers, Alfred's is the moronic face left when authority is stripped of all pretense. But it is also the unfazed visage of the 'gang of idiots' creating and reading the magazine, who are treated like clods by the surrounding world, but are really immune to its surreptitious designs. The unknowing child with the unyielding smile helps unmask adult venality: Mad's features often transformed children's forms -- nursery rhymes and reading primers -- into sardonic commentaries on adult life.

In all this Alfred E. Neuman helped enshrine the dominant view we still have of the conformist 1950s. And as Mad's editor once explained, the magazine eventually helped shape the 1960s counterculture. But by the late 1970s these notions of opposition had themselves become mainstream. What pretensions could Mad puncture without repeating itself? Young adolescents hardly needed to be tutored in distrusting authority. American popular culture had become a culture of opposition and satire. What could be done in response?

During that same period the British comics known as Monty Python provided one answer by creating a different kind of cultural opposition. Pomposity was ridiculed (recall the Ministry of Silly Walks) but so was the pretense of pointing out pomposity. All forms of politics dissolve into a kind of comic nihilism. The comedy is born not from the brain of a Neumanesque child, but from the minds of hyper-educated adults, who know enough to depend on very little.

But despite our saturation with satire, there have still been targets that come into view in Mad ('Did he need the triple bypass?' a credit card advertisement asks of a patient undergoing surgery. 'Or was it the miles?').- Adapted from Is It Still a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?" by Edward Rothstein, The Times, Sept. 18, 1999, and other Times articles